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Saturday, 15 February 2014

My Story - Part 4 - I Submit & 'Resign'

In the weeks following that meeting with
the board, there were many communications (mostly via email) which just
deepened the wounding. As dramatic as it might sound, I felt like I was
fighting for my very life. I begged for someone to listen to me, to hear what
had been going on and help me find a way out of my pain. By this time, elder M
had given up hope and resigned his membership. I desperately wanted to believe
there was a better way to go, that people who claimed to follow Christ should
be able to work this out together, that we didn’t have to stay trapped in an
endless repetition of history!

I really tried to do what I was told – to
just “forgive and move on”. I put my trust in these people and tried to accept
that it was somehow my fault, that there was something wrong with me. But it
was tearing me apart. I was screaming out that I had been bullied and abused by
J and yet I was being told that I should submit to his “godly authority”. And I
just couldn’t do it! So I endured one last bullying session where board member
L delivered the unanimous ‘advice’ of the board to either submit or “consider my
position”. That night I resigned.

But, of course, that didn’t actually deal
with any of the problems. Apparently, I was supposed to just smile and pretend
nothing was wrong but I couldn’t ignore the elephant in the room (especially
when it was emitting such a foul stench!). Eventually, I wrote to the elders to
express my distress at being told, effectively, to sit down and shut up. Their
response was to “relieve” me from the preaching roster and from my position as
prophetic ministry lead. I really don’t think they could see the irony in that –
I objected to being silenced, and they responded by silencing me further!

And so, we limped to church for a few more
months, desperately clinging to the hope that someone, somehow would be able to
‘do something’ about the whole sorry mess. During that time, I was treated like
a pariah. My own brother disowned me, his wife screamed at me in the school car
park when I tried to talk to her, Board member D felt ‘led by God’ to preach
for 3 weeks running about ‘Jezebels and False Prophets’, my personal
conversations at church were monitored and I had all sorts of false accusations
flung at me (apparently I was “murmuring against God’s anointed”). During this
time, there were two new elders appointed who both just happened to be close
friends with elder R, but the final straw for us was when the elders released a
document re-writing history and dismissing any concerns that we had tried to
raise. It was a bureaucratic masterpiece, but a relationship killer.And so we
left.